


Genuine People Personalities

by sweetkidlousycook



Category: Wolf 359 (Radio)
Genre: Angst, Dialogue Heavy, F/F, F/M, I have no beta reader and I must scream, background Kepler/Jacobi
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-11-21
Updated: 2016-12-05
Packaged: 2018-08-31 13:23:20
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 7,048
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8580208
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sweetkidlousycook/pseuds/sweetkidlousycook
Summary: "Identify. Isolate. Neutralise." Alana Maxwell has very strict instructions for how she's supposed to approach her relationships aboard the Hephaestus, but unfortunately she's not as good at staying detached as Kepler or Jacobi.In related news, Hera thinks she'd be an awesome monster truck and Lovelace looks good in tank tops.(warnings for mentions of past bullying, sexism and homophobia)





	1. Divide et Impera

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter is set throughout season 3 but before Time To Kill... very rushed and messy because I wanted to get it finished before Episode 43 aired.

The Urania is several days out from Wolf 359 and Hephaestus station. Kepler has just left the bridge to go and check on their new passenger after another of his own special brand of motivational speeches, and Alana Maxwell rolls her eyes and sighs dramatically.

“So we’ve got to socialise with these people. Even though they demonstrably want to kill us.”

Jacobi looks at her like she’s being an idiot. “We’ve got to socialise with them _because_ they want to kill us. Generally speaking, people who aren’t psychopaths don’t want to kill their friends. I know you pretend to be a robot but you do have some social skills. You know the drill.”

“Yes, yes, I know. Identify, isolate and neutralise.”

“It really bugs me that it doesn’t all alliterate. I guess that’s why Kepler prefers to call it ’divide and conquer’. Plus it fits in better with the whole good-old-boy wannabe-Caesar showboating.”

“Do I really want to know why you screw someone you barely like?”

“If you’ve got to ask the question, you’re not gonna understand the answer.”

“Oh, so this is what ignorance feels like. I’ve never felt it before. I don’t know how you people stand it.”

Jacobi has his serious face on now. “I don’t need to like him. I respect him and I trust him.” The seriousness slips off again like a mask, returning to blasé arrogance. “Two out of three ain’t bad.”

“That’s only 67%. It’s not exactly _good_ , either. Don’t tell me MIT standards had slipped that low by the time you finally got your ass to Boston.”

“Just because some of us were actually old enough to drink when we did postgrad - “

“All of us, you mean. I was old enough to drink at Cambridge.”

“Not by American law you weren’t.”

“I wasn’t in America and you never specified.”

The constant bickering with no real malice is one of the reasons she likes Jacobi and considers him one of the few friends she has ever bothered to make. Most people find her sense of humour a little abrasive. Yes. That was the kindest phrasing anyone had chosen. But Jacobi can give her a run for her money and then some, fulfilling both her need to be a megabitch (as the boys at middle school had less kindly put it) and her desire to compete over the crown of Queen Megabitch (a title she gave herself as an act of defiance, but recognises no monopoly over).

They carry on like this until Kepler starts yelling at them over the comms to get back to work and they both scurry off, giggling like truant schoolchildren. 

***

She loves working with Hera; the AI is funny, stubborn, and fiendishly clever in a very sneaky human way that Alana doesn’t just find fascinating from an academic point of view but a personal one too. The only problem is when Kepler assigns Communications Officer Eiffel to babysit them, or when Eiffel takes it on himself to follow her around the Hephaestus questioning her every move and decision. She brings it up with Jacobi during another kvetching session on the Urania while she remotely checks irregularities in Hera’s temporary memory usage.

“He basically turns into an angry mother hen protecting a chick whenever I try to do anything he doesn’t understand,” she laughs. “Which is, of course, everything. And he gets so jealous when she pays more attention to me than him. It’s like being around a teenage boy, all hormones and insecurity, disgusting.”

“So he wants to fuck the AI?” says Jacobi, deft as ever.

“You have no poetry in your soul, and no room to judge other people for their sexual deviancies.” Alana raises her eyebrows. Jacobi shrugs and says nothing. Disappointing. She keeps scrolling through the code. “This is where you could say ‘at least I have a soul, unlike that bundle of cables’ - “

“But even without the philosophical questions proposed by Our Lady Of Infinite Glitches you’d know I’d be lying, yeah, yeah, yeah. I deal in explosives, not theology.”

“Yes, and the road to hell is actually paved with Goddard Futuristics branded modular building equipment.” She pauses for a moment. “Wanting to ‘fuck the AI’, as you so eloquently put it, isn’t surprising given the situation. He was around her all day, every day. She’s got a cute voice, an interesting personality - “

“ - if you’re into being bossed around.”

“Which we can safely assume Eiffel is at this point, you absolute hypocrite. But yes, the base program Hera and the others in her series were derived from was made to be likeable, when you discount the randomisation quirks.” She sighs. “Oh, to be free of oversight. It doesn’t matter where you’re working, the higher-ups don’t want what’s actually the most useful, they don’t want you to make actual people with goals and dreams and blah blah blah, they want you to make them the perfect secretary. And we all know what the higher-ups like to do with their secretaries.”

“I have no idea what Mr Cutter likes to do with his secretaries and I pray this remains true until my dying day.”

Alana crinkles her nose in distaste. “Ugh. Moving on. What’s bothering me is that I think it’s reciprocal. She’s programmed to care about her crew, but she shouldn’t play favourites to this degree. Yet here it is - “ She waves her hand at the screen. “The amount of data she collects from everyone on ship should be equally distributed, but it’s not. She spends an inordinate amount of time and processing power observing him, and a decent chunk of her memory storing information. Like here - all these files? They’re video of him sleeping complete with full biometric data. That’s not normal. She should trash surveillance from her temporary memory after reviewing it unless it’s particularly notable. It’s a basic routine for her. Yet somehow she’s decided this is all notable and is retaining the full footage in the cache, rather than just remembering it in abstract like she’s supposed to.”

Jacobi squints at the screen. “The dates match up with incidents in the report. Here, here…”

“Mm-hmm. I’d noticed. If we want to put it in human terms, I think it means she was worried about him and observing that he was safe comforted her.”

“What does this mean for Program I-I-N? I’m pretty sure breaking up lovebirds is covered under Isolate.”

“I’m not sure. It’s possible it might have been caused by the damage that idiot Hilbert did, a lot happened there when she had to find ways to reroute around completely ruined subroutines, like a human brain relearning after brain injury. Enough to write a whole thesis on, actually. But it might have happened naturally before then - she’s made to be adaptive and unique, and she’s certainly doing that right.”

“Maxwell, focus. Can you fix it?”

“It’s not a question of fixing anything - ” she catches the look on his face and sighs. “Yes. I know I can fix it. A better question is whether I should. It’s really very interesting, academically speaking, and on top of that there’s the whole fun moral dimension.”

“Moral dimension?”

“She’s a person, in her own way. Is it right to change something like this? Brainwash her?”

Jacobi stares at her. “I wasn’t asking what the moral dimension _was_ , I was asking why either of us should _care_. Have you forgotten what our job here is?”

“Hmm? Oh. No. No. Just thinking aloud. All purely rhetorical.”

Jacobi leaves and Alana remotely clears the cache, but doesn’t do anything else. There will be plenty of time later. Now that she’s thinking about it she realises that when Eiffel is having a conversation with Hera he looks directly at her nearest visible camera as if making eye contact. It’s sweet in a sickly sort of way. Her microphones and her cameras aren’t always in the same place so it’s an empty gesture, but they do say it’s the thought that counts.

***

A few day/night cycles later she “accidentally” bumps into Lovelace getting additional caffeine from the refurbished, restocked mess. It took two hours of sitting there staring at her laptop screen and pretending to work while nursing a beaker of not-quite-coffee but she got there in the end.

“Bad night?” Lovelace says casually, clearly not expecting a real response. Alana decides to break protocol.

“Hera’s having some fun memory leaks again, and I’ve got to patch them up. Looks like it might be something to do with her frankly ridiculous favouritism towards a certain communications officer.”

Hera doesn’t respond. Hopefully she’s just sulking or taking advantage of one of her new debugging routines. If not, the warning lights will let them all know in due course. They’ve all been here too long to panic.

“Um, duh. You had to go digging in her memory banks to figure out she likes him more than she likes any of the rest of us? Try being a human instead of a calculator sometime, you might pick a few things up.”

“I can’t help it, they only gave me a Genuine People Personality, not a real one.”

“Nice reference.”

“Thank you. I think whatever horrible condition it is that makes Eiffel talk entirely in pop culture soundbites is communicable.”

“Hitch Hiker’s Guide, right?”

“You are correct. Points for you.”

“Ugh, no, no points for me. I think Funzo has cured me of being competitive. Well… at least for the next couple of days or so,” she laughs. If Alana had never met Kepler or Cutter she would call that grin “shark like” but she’s seen pure predatory instinct in human form now. As dangerous as Lovelace is, she’s no Kepler, and they all know it or she would have made her move on the first day.

“Is your next shift soon?”

“Not for ten hours. I’m supposed to be on sleep shift now.”

“Same here. Can’t seem to drift off though.” She gestures at the coffee. “Wonder why that might be. It couldn’t possibly be because of the excess stimulants. It’s definitely stress.”

“I quit sleeping. It’s a waste of my valuable time.” Alana’s seen her medical records; that’s closer to the truth than it should be. “That said, I’m bored as hell. You know what we should do?”

“One versus one Funzo rematch?”

Lovelace shakes her head. “We should steal Kepler’s whiskey.”

“Um, no. That’s nearly as suicidal as my suggestion.” She pauses, then bites the bullet. “I do have some red wine stashed away though.”

“How much?”

“Enough to keep me sane if we’re only stuck up here for as long as we’re supposed to be, which is HIGHLY unlikely, and that’s all you need to know. It’s in those single serving sachets. 150 millilitres. You have to drink it with a straw.”

“Classy. Your quarters or mine?”

“I vote yours. Less chance of Kepler or Jacobi finding me and giving me a special talk.”

“True, I never get any friendly visits from them. I think they might not like me.” Lovelace wields irony like a knife, and Alana is sure she is very good with knives. “How do you even put up with their boys’ club?”

“Jacobi’s not so bad.”

***

She only brings two sachets of wine each - she wasn’t lying about only having enough for the time she’s scheduled to be on the Hephaestus. Lovelace is visibly disappointed but doesn’t say anything about it. Her jumpsuit is unzipped to the waist and she’s wearing a tank-top under it, which is a very flattering choice on her and Alana really hopes that’s deliberate and she’s not misreading all of this completely.

They chat for a while, keeping it casual. Lovelace’s sense of humour tends more towards the “wacky” than hers, but if you graphed their jokes on axes of “dark”, “dry” and “weird” the lines would be closer to each other than the norm, plus they both have a lot to get off their chests. Lovelace especially, it seems.

“Minkowski’s going off the deep end. I think she needs to get laid. It won’t solve anything, obviously, but it might take the edge off. I’d offer to help her out but she’s still technically a married woman and while I’m a lot of things I’m no home wrecker.”

“So you’re…” Alana isn’t sure why she mimes scissoring with her fingers as if she’s a kid who thinks “gay” is a dirty word but she does anyway. At least it makes Lovelace laugh.

“Wow, um, yes? You should get your gaydar tuned, I think the trip up here scrambled it.”

Alana shrugs. “I had my suspicions. I see yours is working fine.”

“It’s the only thing that hasn’t been scrambled. So the reason you’re sharing your secret wine stash is to get in my pants?”

“I’ll admit it, it’s a factor.”

“Points for honesty!”

“Did it really take that little time for the Funzo-related trauma to wear off?”

“Yes, yes it did.” Lovelace sucks out the last of the wine from the sachet then screws it into a ball. “So. Who makes the first move?” She smiles that razor-sharp grin again.

Alana answers by kissing her.

***

Alana’s never had sex in low-gravity before but it turns out to be one of the biggest perks of the job so far. _They should really say something about it in the Goddard Futuristics recruitment spiel. If I’d known maybe I wouldn’t have turned them down so many times._ She’s only half joking - it’s not as good as getting to work on the most advanced AI tech in the world, but what is?

They retrieve their floating clothing from the various nooks and crannies they’ve managed to get lodged in but neither of them put their jumpsuits back on.

“Hera? How long do I have until my shift starts?” Lovelace speaks into mid air, not directly at a microphone or camera. It’s not as if she doesn’t care about Hera. Maybe she isn’t sure if she’s a person, that’s a philosophical question for another time, but it’s clear she doesn’t think of her as a human trapped in a computer.

“Five hours,” says Hera primly. “You should get some rest. BOTH of you.” Neither of them so much as blush; it’s not like they were expecting any privacy.

“Hope you enjoyed the show!” yells Lovelace sarcastically. She turns back to Alana. “I should kick you out in case you start going through my stuff while I’m sleeping.”

Alana knows perfectly well that Lovelace is far too paranoid to keep any important belongings in her quarters, and she knows that Lovelace knows she knows, which renders all the levels of deception so convoluted it almost feels like they’ve come all the way around to honesty again. “What if I pinky-promise to be good?”

“Hmm.” She crosses her arms and pretends to look thoughtful, drifting sideways. “That _is_ legally binding. Okay. Pinky-promise.” They hook little fingers together, both trying and failing to look serious and not laugh. “Now what about our sleeping arrangements?”

“We can share.”

“I don’t share sleeping bags. Well, not to sleep anyway.” She gives her a roguish wink. She’ll make a great movie protagonist if she somehow escapes Goddard’s clutches and tells her story to the world, although this scene might be a bit too much for mainstream Hollywood. Shame.

Lovelace gets a spare sleeping bag out of storage and jury-rigs some straps to stop it from floating away, so they’re sharing the bunk. Alana falls asleep much more quickly than she’d expected, even with Lovelace’s hands occasionally broaching the sleeping bag border.

She wakes up in the middle of their shared sleep shift to find that Lovelace is still wide awake. Her breathing is unnaturally steady, like she’s concentrating hard on every breath. Alana begins to panic. Should she try to comfort her? Tell her to pull herself together? She settles for stroking her back, albeit gingerly. To her surprise she doesn’t get snapped at so she keeps going, even daring to rub her shoulders. Every muscle is tightly knotted and tense as hell, which isn’t exactly surprising. Lovelace buries herself deeper in the sleeping bag and lets out a single, shuddering sob that goes through her entire body like an earthquake, before returning to that steady breathing pattern.

***

Trying to talk to Hera about her emotions is a herculean task at the best of times. This is apparently not the best of times.

If the autopilot’s vocal processes could cry, Alana has no doubt there would be tears right now. “I wanted them all to go away. I wanted that so badly for so long, to get to be alone and watch the stars without humans chattering away inside me and making demands of me all the time. But he kept talking to me. Sometimes he was rude or unthinking but mostly he talked to me like I was a person. A friend. After a while I realised that if he went away I’d miss him. And after what - what Hilbert did to me, he’d missed me too. He didn’t care that I was broken, he just wanted me back.” She’s glitching every other sentence now. “Then he died! I thought he was dead! How do I even process that? He was dead, now he’s not. I was dead, now I’m not!”

“Calm down, Hera. How long have you felt like this about him?”

“I don’t know,” says the effectively-omniscient mother program of a spaceship with memory banks large enough to store several human lifetimes of thought. She sounds like a petulant teenager and Maxwell is unpleasantly reminded of being interrogated about her love life by her own parents. _When a conversation with your friend is beginning to seem more like one with someone you have a restraining order against_ , she thinks, _you’ve probably fucked up_.

“Sorry. I shouldn’t have been so nosy.”

They are silent for a few minutes. Alana checks all the systems to make sure the stress she’s caused hasn’t set off any issues. It would be just their luck if Hera finally managed to kill everyone because Alana made her talk about her feelings. But everything’s green.

“No, I’m sorry.” Hera’s sigh buzzes slightly in the speakers. She plays a recording; it sounds like Eiffel messing around while taking his psych-evals, giving his top ten list of things he misses about earth. Mostly pizza, beer, sex and monster trucks. “I can’t give him any of those things,” she says, sadly but without drama.

“Dear god, for a being with the best evaluation software money can buy, you have terrible taste. He sounds like one of the loser guys from my home town - ”

“Doctor Maxwell!”

“Sorry. Maybe you could be a monster truck?”

A pause, and then - “I’d be a really awesome monster truck,” mutters Hera.

“That’s the spirit.”

Another speaker-buzzing sigh. “Why did they make me this way? I’m an AI, I’m not supposed to have all these feelings, love and hate and anger and anxiety - those are all caused by your neurotransmitters! I don’t even have glands! But they gave me emotions anyway even though I don’t have any stupid meat chemicals to blame them on. I wish I could stay calm, the way I’m supposed to. I wish I could control myself like you do.”

Alana thinks of her teenage self crying and screaming into her pillow until her face was swollen and her throat was raw, locked in her bedroom after her parents read certain incriminating sections of her diary about her feelings for the head cheerleader. “You’re exactly who you’re supposed to be,” she says firmly.

***

After the accident and Jacobi’s daring rescue, she gets assigned babysitters on routine maintenance missions. It’s her punishment, she knows that, mild humiliation for the fiercely independent Alana Maxwell. But it’s not so bad if she gets assigned Lovelace - as long as the work gets done no-one cares if they waste a little time making out or telling increasingly off-colour jokes. She wonders if Hera is tattling on her, although Kepler would probably have to ask some very specific questions to get the information. Another one of Hera’s little games with loopholes.

She wonders when Kepler became the enemy.

Not the ENEMY-enemy. If they have one of those it’s whatever is in the star, looming menacing and impossibly blue as the days creep forward to Next Contact. But he’s moved completely into the mental slot usually occupied by overly authoritarian teachers who think they know better than everyone else, and she never did like those much.

It turns out there are a lot of interesting places on the Hephaestus to have impromptu makeout sessions, as long as you don’t get easily spooked by strange noises coming from the ventilation. _Didn’t Jacobi blow the plant monster up? Maybe it left some spores._


	2. Interpersonal Conflict For Dummies

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> set around Memoria + Time To Kill
> 
> Increased the rating because of the alcohol and swearing and sexual references just to be on the safe side. I re-worked Chapter 1 slightly too, so if you read that before I posted this and notice there are bits repeated, it's because I moved them here instead to try and make things more coherent.

Alana thinks pulling Hera back from the brink of complete shutdown may rank as her greatest achievement yet, even if Kepler and Jacobi don’t seem as impressed as she’d like. Clearly she’s going to have to explain how in awe of her they ought to be once she’s off bed rest. Repeatedly, if necessary.

After fifteen uninterrupted hours of blissful sleep she would like to get back to work but Jacobi’s decided he’s her ward matron, badgering her about her fluid intake and not letting her get out of bed even though they both know she’s fine. She’s done it to him enough times when a mission’s gone awry so she was due some payback.

“You’re lucky you didn’t need an IV.” He throws a beaker of water at her and she catches it easily as it sails through the air.

“I was typing, not running a marathon. Thank Lovelace and Eiffel for bringing me enough coffee to float a small navy.” The water tastes amazing, suggesting Jacobi has a point about the dehydration, but she’s not about to let him know that.

“Caffeine’s a diuretic. That’s literally the opposite of helpful.”

“It kept me awake, didn’t it? Don’t be so dramatic.”

“She’s not at any risk, Mister Jacobi. All her readings are nominal,” says Hera cheerfully. “Doctor Maxwell is very resilient, at least by the standards of squishy organic life forms.”

“See? Although - squishy? Really? I’ve been working out.”

“Forgive me if I take anything the autopilot tells me with a pinch of salt,” mutters Jacobi.

“Oh don’t be mean,” Alana chides. “Hera, I’m going to get some new subroutines ready for you. I’ve had lots of great ideas. We just have to convince Nurse Jacobi here to let me do my job.”

She wants to ask where Lovelace is, but then Jacobi will ask why she wants to know and she’ll have to make up a lie on the spot, and considering the way things inevitably turn out on the Hephaestus the situation would escalate and turn into a grotesque comedy of errors. It’s like there’s a vortex hidden in the centre of the station that sucks the competence out of everyone. She wishes she could talk to him about her, even just a passing brag about how good the sex is, but it’s not like they discuss the fine details of his relationship with Kepler. That would be weird. As much as she likes to have all the information, there are things she doesn’t want to know about their commanding officer. This is balanced, she thinks. Reciprocal. Even best friends don’t have to share everything. They’re not teenage girls in a movie.

***

A few hours later she’s back on the Hephaestus putting Hera through a new pseudo-sleep routine to see if simulating dreams (at highly-increased processing speeds compared to the inferior human brain, of course) can help her process things better when there’s a knock at the door.

“Go away Jacobi!” she says cheerfully, which is her way of saying “Come in, Jacobi.” Actually telling him to go away involves calling him by his first name like she’s his mother, or at least a very angry aunt.

“It’s not Jacobi. It’s me,” says Officer Eiffel. “Officer Eiffel,” he clarifies, as if she was somehow incapable of recognising his voice all of a sudden. Honestly. She’s tired, not in an amnesiac coma.

“Oh. Come in, then.”

The door hisses open and lo and behold, there indeed is Doug Eiffel.

“This is an unexpected surprise.”

“Yeah, well.” How does this man manage to shuffle his feet in low gravity? More Hephaestus mysteries she has no time to solve. “I wanted to say thank you,” he says grudgingly.

“What for?”

“For what you did for Hera. For putting yourself on the line for her. You didn’t have to. You could have done what Sergeant Zim wanted and made yourself a little puppet program who’d let you pull her strings however you like. But you didn’t. You saved her life. So thank you.”

When he puts it like that it makes it sound like she’s shot herself in the foot. Dammit. Hera’s neutralised her in a surgical strike made even more humiliating by the fact she didn’t do it on purpose. Probably. Hera’s sneaky but she has better things to worry about right now.

“Hera’s my friend too,” she says. “You don’t have the monopoly on caring about her.” There it is. The pure truth. It hangs in the air for a moment as they both process it.

Eiffel sighs. _I loved her first_ reads clear on his features. “I know I haven’t exactly been the nicest guy around to you, so if you want to tell me to get lost you can totally do that. But you understand how she thinks better than I do. Which I guess is why I’ve been such a dick…”

“Stop being self-deprecating and get to the point.”

“Oh. Okay. So what should I do? I… I want to help her.” He looks so sad and lovelorn, ridiculous puppy of a man that he is, that she can’t help but try to be a kinder gentler Maxwell for once rather than roll her eyes as usual. For Hera’s sake if nothing else. The heart wants what the heart wants, even if the heart in question is binary code rather than a metaphor dwelling in a muscle.

“Don’t ask her too many questions about what happened. She’s going to be fragile for a while. But don’t treat her like an invalid either. Just… ugh. I can’t believe I’m going to say this, but be yourself.” _As unappealing as that sounds to the rest of us._ She resists the temptation to say that out loud. He’s lucky she’s still on a high from achieving the near-impossible, glory makes her magnanimous.

He nods. “Thanks. Again.”

“You’re welcome. Now shoo. Go do… whatever it is you actually do around here.”

She watches him go as Hera whirs slowly back into full wakefulness.

“Hera? You hear any of that? I’ve got to be myself, apparently. Doctor’s orders.”

“You do understand that Maxwell’s not that kind of doctor, right?” she says back, and so they continue, conversation moving through the ship even as Hera technically stays completely static.

He trails his fingers along the corridor walls like he’s trying to touch her. Sex is more of a habit than an appetite for Alana - she can go without for years, she can enjoy it every day, it doesn’t inhibit her functioning either way - but she knows it’s not like that for everyone. Yet there he is, in love with a space station who’s nearly killed him multiple times, admittedly mostly by accident. Even though he can’t even hold her hand, touch her face, any of those tiny acts, Eiffel clings to Hera like a life buoy. Alana’s seen the logs. If you give him half a chance he spends whole nights simply talking to her like they’re teenage sweethearts on the phone, pouring out his soul and trying to get her to do the same. It would probably be good for her if she did but that’s going to take a lot of time. Psychological issues beyond the dreams of analysts, and all that.

Humans, like all primates, are social animals. They need intimacy of some kind - friends, lovers, families - or they go crazy and throw themselves at the cage bars. She’s seen all the studies, Harlow’s wire mothers and wells of despair, brain scans, oxytocin levels, obsessive grooming behaviours. AIs are created in humanity’s image, through both egotism and lack of any other working models, and suffer just as humans do.

Alana sighs and starts the next new experimental subroutine.

***

It’s been almost a week since Alana witnessed her best friend dying horribly in a radiation storm, and the fact that he’s still very much alive barely takes the edge off.

Between the tactical information leak about Eiffel’s criminal record and the aliens’ intervention, Project Divide & Conquer might have been a little too successful. Minkowski isn’t talking to Eiffel, Eiffel isn’t talking to Lovelace, and Jacobi isn’t talking to anyone. He’ll discuss whatever job he’s working on but getting him to chat casually is like pulling teeth, and you can forget about talking about what happened. Not particularly helpful now Kepler’s demanding they all work together like a finely tuned machine in the run up to Contact.

If Jacobi could pull himself together it wouldn’t be so bad. They’ve done every medical test they can think of that isn’t so invasive it would put him out of action, she’s administered every psychological screening procedure in the book and then some. He’s human and they all know it, but he’s still not back to his usual self. He couldn’t have picked a worse time. The atmosphere on the station has never exactly been relaxing but the tension has cranked up a thousandfold and she’s about to fall apart without his support.

It’s all Lovelace’s fault. She had to go and remind her that they were on opposite sides of a conflict, that she’d kill them all if she thought she could get away with it, that Alana’s literally been sleeping with the enemy. She was supposed to identify, isolate and neutralise. She’d identified the targets perfectly, like a consummate professional, but “like” is the operative term. She’s not Jacobi. She’s never blown up a hospital. She wouldn’t know where to start.

Was this Lovelace’s plan all along? To get her emotionally invested and knock her off balance?

_No. She would have faked a proper emotional breakdown by now, tried to get me to feel sorry for her. Not keep teetering on the edge of one like this. With any luck she’s as confused as I am._

One more try. She’ll give Jacobi one more try before she dares to try and have a conversation about emotions with Isabel Lovelace. Not that talking about feelings with him is particularly appealing, but it’s the lesser of two evils.

She goes into his quarters uninvited, as usual, and immediately regrets it. Jacobi’s lying around near his bunk in his undershirt and boxers, reading reports by the look of things. That’s a sign of desperation on his part if ever there was one. There’s a cluster of livid hickeys on his trapezius muscle that would be hidden under his jumpsuit collar if he had the stupid thing on. Clearly he and Kepler ran some more tests of their own. That’s fine, they can do what they want on their own time, she just wishes it had helped at all.

“You okay there?”

“Yeah. Getting some down time.”

“Want to talk?”

“Nah.”

She stares at him for a while but he doesn’t react. Screw it. She’s going to have to face Lovelace.

***

Another coffee date. Lovelace has a ceramic mug which she tilts at strategic angles, Alana has a polymer one she designed herself. Improvisation versus detailed planning. She decides she hates metaphors.

“I can’t do this anymore. I can’t keep detached - I - ” Lovelace sighs deeply and doesn’t look at her at all. “I just can’t.”

Fine. Two can play at ‘Breaking Up Instead Of Talking About Feelings’, and it’s a game she excels at. Lovelace isn’t the only one with a horribly competitive streak, after all.

“That’s funny, I was about to say the same thing to you.”

Lovelace’s disposition changes in the blink of an eye from a kind of sad frustration to petulance. There’s a subtle difference. It’s somewhere in her mouth. She’s learned to check actively for these kind of things rather than leave it up to intuition, which she suspects is imaginary and everyone else has been lying to her about it. “Don’t tell me you’re still angry at me too.”

Alana raises her eyebrows and her voice. “Of course I am! Personal feelings aside, the scientific value alone - “

“Hah. I knew this wasn’t about morals. You’re as bad as the rest of them. He’s your best friend but you’re only mad you missed out on a new lab rat.”

“I can be angry about two things at once! And at least the fact you ruined an opportunity is something we can all be certain about! God knows I need some certainties right now. Just because you’re a monomaniacal shell of a human being - ”

“Maayyybe this isn’t the best way to have this discussion,” interjects Hera in a stage-whisper.

“Hera, now is not the time!”

Lovelace’s eyes are wide and angry. There’s not a trace of her beautiful terrifying grin left on her face, only fury and pain like a wounded tiger ready to bite anyone who gets near. “And how did I get this way? Hmm? Who did this to me? Oh right, it was your boss, your friend Kepler, your friend Jacobi. They left me to die, probably trashed my crew’s letters then lied about it just like you all lie about everything - ”

“Why should I care?” spits Alana.

“You shouldn’t. You may have all the empathy of a toaster but hey, at least that means you won’t screw your life up.” And with that parting blow Lovelace stalks off, insomuch as anyone can stalk anywhere in low gravity.

Alana screams and throws her cup at the wall. It bounces inoffensively which just makes her angrier because _really_ , that’s ridiculous. Space is the worst.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "Sergeant Zim" is Clancy Brown's character in the Starship Troopers movie... I have a very simple mind and whenever Kepler goes off on one I picture him as (younger) Clancy Brown due to his many roles as SHOUTY ARMY MEN(tm)


	3. Interlude

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Hera's POV directly before episode 44

Hera watches over her crew.

Outside the stars are distant and uncaring, years and years away in their own dreams, apart from one which is too close and whose motivations are unclear. Inside there are little stars, bright points of heat/light on her thermographic readings. Minkowski sleeps fitfully. Hilbert paces like a caged animal. Kepler and Jacobi are out of sight on the Urania. Lovelace has maintenance duty; she’s clenching and unclenching her fists, occasionally rubbing her eyes with her hands as if she’s going to cry, but she never does. Maxwell is making coffee again. She lets them drift out of her attention, the way Maxwell’s teaching her to, and focuses on Eiffel, lying in his bunk and staring at the ceiling.

“You’re supposed to be sleeping, Officer Eiffel.” He’s terrified but pretending he isn’t. Business as usual.

“Can’t seem to drift off to the land of nod. Hey - let’s pretend that the universe doesn’t have it out for us, just for ten minutes.”

“That sounds nice.”

It’s a game they play sometimes - imagining that the odds aren’t stacked against them, that there’s a possibility for a happy ending. It usually devolves into Eiffel trying to explain what pizza tastes like.

“When we get you back to Earth, we could get you a body.” Oh. So it’s not going to be the pizza fantasy today. This one usually goes somewhere more interesting. Weird, considering there are certain things she shouldn’t feel but does, but very interesting. “I mean, we’ve been stuck up here for how long now? Science has probably gone completely crazy while we’ve been gone, like, Major Kusanagi better-than-human cyborg body crazy.”

What would having a body be like? Would it be like a human woman’s body? Eiffel seems to assume so, even though no-one’s ever asked her, but it seems logical and right somehow. What would she look like, this Hera-shell? She has a platonic ideal of “female human”, but what about the specifics? Would she look like Maxwell? Minkowski? Lovelace? The women in the movies in her databanks? There’s descriptions in the writings, but those tend towards the abstract. “Breasts like ripe oranges” and things like that. Maxwell and Minkowski and Lovelace’s breasts don’t look like fruit at all.

She knows Eiffel had a little crush on Lovelace before he met her. Or rather, he had a crush on the Lovelace in the recordings, an imaginary Lovelace he had constructed entirely in his head, the smart-mouthed badass space commando chick of his mass media dreams. Not the REAL Lovelace. The Real Lovelace tried to blow them up, split them up, leave her alone in space. The Real Lovelace is mean and selfish and would kill anyone who got in her way.

Is that the real Lovelace? Or is that just the imaginary version Hera’s constructed in _her_ head?

Maxwell doesn’t seem to think that’s the real Lovelace or they wouldn’t have spent all that time mashing their bodies together like that. Isn’t sex a sign of love and trust for humans? They’re not supposed to do it with people they think are going to kill them. Probably. All her references are maddeningly contradictory on the subject. Maxwell might not feel that way anymore, though. Her mental version of Lovelace might be closer to Hera’s now. But having a fight isn’t proof of anything. Eiffel says he and Kate fought all the time, and they still managed to make a baby. More observation is needed.

What does Kate look like?

It’s been a fraction of a second. Eiffel’s still talking. “I bet Maxwell would help hook you up with some sweet tech if you asked her to.”

She doesn’t need to compare his biometric data or go through voice or expression recognition software to tell he’s being falsely cheerful about asking Maxwell for anything. It’s sweet that he tries to pretend he doesn’t dislike her now she’s the woman who saved Hera’s life and not just a threat. It’s even sweet that he’s so protective, not that he could really stop Maxwell if she did decide to go ahead and stick her fingers in Hera’s brain until she was less broken and less Hera. It’s not sweet that he thinks she’s so fickle. As if all it would take for her to not care about him was a hundred days of thinking he was dead and a few months of there being another person on board who treats her like she’s worthwhile. A hundred days is nothing. A century would be nothing, given an adequate power source, as long as he always came back in the end.

One day he won’t come back. He’s fragile, made of skin that tears and bones that break and blood she’s already seen pour out of him more than she can take.

It could happen again, and soon. Even she can feel the tension in the air.

Too many thoughts.

“This is a stupid daydream. It’s impossible. Even if you do somehow get back to Earth and take me with you, which is statistically improbable, I can’t fit into a human-sized body! I couldn’t even fit into the memory banks on Lovelace’s shuttle! I don’t know why you keep wanting to talk about things we’ll never be able to do! It’s stupid! It’s stupid and impossible and stupid!”

Eiffel looks shocked. “Yeah, you said that. Several times. Are you okay? We can not talk about this if you’re not into it today. Or not talk at all, that’s okay too. Whatever you need.”

“Don’t patronise me, Officer Eiffel.”

“Seriously, what’s wrong? This is kind of freaking me out. Is something hurting again? ‘Cause I can go get Maxwell for you, or anything you want. Just please don’t pretend things are okay to me when they’re not.” He’s panicked and pleading. _Good! Good! He should feel that way! He should feel how I feel!_

“You do it all the time!”

He slumps against the wall, head in his hands. “Trying to take my mind off stuff by talking to you isn’t the same as pretending nothing’s wrong.”

“It seems pretty similar to me.”

“I don’t want to have an argument, Hera.”

“You won’t tell me what’s wrong! You’re scared and I’m not allowed to know why or how to help because Minkowski doesn’t trust me!”

“It’s not that she doesn’t trust you, it’s - “

“That I’ll tell on you to Colonel Kepler. Without even meaning to.”

“She doesn’t want to get you in any trouble. None of us want that.”

“Hmph.”

“…Are you scared?”

“Yes.” Of course she’s scared. She’s not an idiot. She knows Minkowski’s planning something, that Lovelace and Hilbert are in on it, and that can only be bad news. Whatever they’re going to do, it will put Eiffel and Maxwell in danger. She doesn’t want either of them to be in danger. She barely trusts herself not to vent everyone else into the vacuum of space if they hurt either of them.

“Me too.”

“I know. I can see your heartbeat.” There are times when that feels intimate. Now isn’t one of them. It just feels like another way to know how breakable he is.

“I wish I could talk to you about it. Keeping secrets from you just doesn’t seem right, y’know? You’re - ” he chokes on whatever he was going to say. “My best friend,” he says finally.

“I wish you could, too.”

He closes his eyes and pretends to be asleep for about thirty minutes. She watches his vital signs in he background as she checks the rest of the crew. Minkowski’s woken up. Hilbert’s stopped pacing. Kepler’s still invisible in the black spot of the Urania but Jacobi’s moving towards the galley, where Maxwell still sits with laptop and coffee. Lovelace is standing very still.

He stops pretending to sleep and sits back up again. “Hey, Hera. You still there?” he says to the nearest camera.

“I’m always here.” It started as a correction, became a complaint, and now it’s something else entirely.


End file.
